Author: Dave
Band: Silence the Martyr
Album: Silence the Martyr
Label: Independent
Silence the Martyr is the industrial/avant-garde death metal project of brothers Collin and Donovan Cox, who have been involved in the Atlanta metal scene since the mid-nineties. And I’ll be the first to admit that industrial death metal is not something I spin on a regular basis at all. Generally, if it’s not classic old-school death metal, I don’t have much use for it. But I enjoyed the band’s 2014 EP The Initiation, so I went ahead and purchased their eponymous debut LP, and I’m glad I did as it’s quite an interesting release.
Overall, they have kept their same industrial death sound, but this release has a lot more variety in it. The songs vary from tracks built around more atmospheric and melodic riffs like “Answers Foretold” to straight up grind tracks like “Burn” all the way to the bizarre and dissonant black/ambient/noise track “Their Mouth is an Open Grave”. Because of this, the album doesn’t flow the way you might expect most albums to, but this is actually one of the things I enjoyed about this release. This variety serves to constantly engage the you as the listener, and even if it is jarring at times, it’s a good kind of jarring.
With the exception of a couple tracks where clean vocals are used sparingly, the rest of the vocals are pretty much consistent throughout and are of a very deep guttural sort – like the sound a watermelon rind makes in your garbage disposal. Though at times they do have a bit of a core vibe to them, they still manage to complement the music’s raw edge. I am unsure as to whether there was any post-processing done to the vocal tracks, since at times they sound so distorted that they resemble the sound of a machine eating itself. And I’m not sure that any human can actually reproduce that sound naturally. But processed or not, the bottom line is that they work.
Possibly one of the album’s greatest strengths lies in the mixing and production. Because although there are a good bit of layers at work here, nothing comes off as too overpowering. The guitars and bass are equally audible and the riffs stand out nicely, which is something I feel is necessary in any metal album but that I’ve rarely heard done well on a lot of the heavier or brutal death releases I’ve heard. I think that the track that best captures the variety that the Cox brothers do so well is album’s central highlight, “Our Dreams Fail Us”. It has a masterful blend of clean arpeggios, droning keyboards, clean and harsh vocals, a really sweet guitar riff, and a hauntingly heavy percussion line played on the toms. And all of it just fits like a glove.
So if you happen to like that heavy industrial sound or just have a penchant for the more experimental music out there, this is definitely a worthy release to check out.
8/10
- Dave
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXz2tfTZyn8
Check ’em out here: http://silencethemartyr.bandcamp.com
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